"I know."
"I'm not telling you so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm telling you so you know I know. I'm not going to fight it. Whatever your lawyer does. I'll sign whatever." She looked past Nora, down the hall toward the kitchen and the back door and the yard and the tree. "Is it still making lemons?"
"Yes."
"Good," her mother said. "Daddy would like that." And she went down the steps, and got in the silver Camry with the dent in the rear door, and drove away, and Nora stood in the doorway with four typed pages in her hand until the car was gone.
* * *
The settlement conference was held on the ninth of October in a conference room on the fourteenth floor of a building on Capitol Mall, with a view of the Tower Bridge painted gold in the afternoon light, and Nora, thirty-eight weeks pregnant, sat through it with her feet up on a second chair that Marcus Okafor had brought in from his own office without being asked.
Grant sat across the table beside Doug Pruett. He had shaved. He wore a navy suit she had picked out for him at Macy's two springs ago and a tie she didn't recognize. He did not look at her stomach, and he did not look at her face; he looked at a point just over her left shoulder, as though there were a window there.
Doug Pruett had sent a letter in September, in his three fonts, that laid out their position. Mr. Hollis, the letter said, had been added to title by a valid, notarized interspousal transfer deed, executed knowingly and voluntarily by Mrs. Hollis as an expression of her commitment to the marriage and their growing family. The residence was therefore community property. In the dissolution, Mr. Hollis would be seeking his one-half interest, or a buyout at fair market value. Mr. Hollis was, however, prepared to be generous, given Mrs. Hollis's condition. He would accept one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.
"Generous," Priya had said, reading it aloud in Nora's kitchen. "He wants to be paid a quarter of your grandfather's house for the privilege of having robbed you."
"He thinks we can't prove it," Nora said. "He thinks it's his word against mine. He thinks she'll protect him."
Marcus had read the letter on speakerphone and then said, in his unhurried way, "Good. Let him think it. Let's get him in a room."
Now, in the room, Doug Pruett restated the position at some length. Marcus let him. He asked a few mild questions. Had Mr. Hollis discussed the transfer with his wife before May? He had. Had she agreed? She'd said she would think about it, and later she had indicated agreement. Had she read the document before signing? Mr. Hollis had explained every document to her, page by page, as he always did. He was very careful about that.
"So your client's position," Marcus said, "is that Mrs. Hollis knew she was signing an interspousal transfer deed on May fourteenth."